Saturday, January 31, 2015

Okay, we all know what you’re expecting me to write about
today. Yes, the Kardashians are actually aliens!

I read that while standing in line at a supermarket. And who
am I to doubt what appears in print? I
mean, for example, if you read what the newspapers are writing in the wake of
Greece’s Parliamentary elections last Sunday, everyone predicted precisely what
happened. (Though, in my own immodest
moment, I hasten to point out that as far as I can tell only yours truly hit
the trifecta…picking SYRIZA to finish #1, New Democracy #2, and Golden Dawn
(Chrysi Avgi) #3—not to mention the story line in my second Andreas Kaldis’
novel, Assassins of Athens coming to
life :)).

SYRIZA far left, Independent Greeks far right.

Far left SYRIZA came in two seats short (149) of what it
needed (151 of 300) to form a government on its own, and immediately partnered
with a far right party that shared its views on ending austerity, Independent
Greeks with 13 seats.As for how much
else those coalition partners share, we shall see.Independent Greeks’ leader, Panos Kammenos, was
reported as content to throw his party’s support to SYRIZA simply on the
promise of being appointed Defense Minister; a touchy appointment considering
the history of that ministry, so we’ll see how that plays out.

Coalition leaders, Kammenos and Tsipras

So, what really
happened?

Simple. The guys who promised precisely what the people
wanted to hear won. Period, end of story.

Well, not quite the end.Now, the same folks who’ve been lambasting and vilifying the EU-European
Central Bank-IMF troika for years and vowing to immediately disavow Greece’s
austerity inducing debt obligations and enacted measures, have literally
overnight found a new mantra on the subject: employ conciliatory, respectful
language in public discussions with or about Greece’s lenders. As for those new
government ministers who didn’t get the “talk nice,” memo, they’ve been dressed
down in public by their party leadership as “inexperienced public communicators.”That doesn’t mean what they said was
incorrect, just that it’s not the way to put things. Any more.

Days before the Election

For example, on Thursday the EU Parliament's President came to
Athens to meet with Greece’s new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, and he was initially effusive in his praise of how the meeting went, particularly over Tsipras’ vow
to crack down on tax cheats and corruption. But what I found most significant was Ekathimerini’s (Greece’s newspaper of
record) report of Prime Minister Tsipras’ take on the meeting:

“The Greek premier, for his part, said that his
government was aiming for ‘a comprehensive European and mutually beneficial
solution on matters of common interest.’ He noted that ‘it will take time’ for
such an agreement to be reached. But he insisted that his administration, which
wants to renegotiate Greece’s loan commitments, is open to discussions. ‘We are
negotiating with safety, we are guaranteeing stability,’ he said.”

Wow, what a change...for the time being.

European Parliament President and Tsipras in Athens

Don’t get me wrong. I’m pleased to see that the new government
has left its firebrands at the door. After all, now it’s their house they risk
burning down.

And they’ve hit the ground running, giving at least the
impression things are changing.For
example, the photograph at the top of this post is of Tsipras being sworn in as
Prime Minister by Greece’s President in a civil ceremony…an oath usually administered
amid pomp and circumstance on a Bible in the presence of the Archbishop of
Athens.

But it’s way too soon to speculate on what will ultimately
happen. The knee-jerk reaction of the world's financial markets has Greek
banks besieged on all fronts, and though some of SYRIZA's promises to its supporters have already been kept (rehiring cleaning people at the finance ministry) more significant ones are on hold (increasing the minimum wage).

Assuming Greece’s leadership is sincere in its more
conciliatory approach, the real test will come at SYRIZA’a rank and file level when
it’s Tsipras’ time to deliver on his key economic promises––goals dramatically different from what the EU says it's prepared to accept. That’s assuming, too, that his newly
appointed government ministers representing the many different factions making
up SYRIZA (an acronym in Greek for “The Coalition of the Radical Left) will
follow their prime minister’s lead in substance as well as form.

Yes, there are a lot of thorns to prick oneself upon before
reaching the rose, but on balance, public relations have been going about as well as the
new prime minister could hope for. Then again, he’s always been good at that.Still, his first steps so far over the first week seem in the right direction, even if viewed through the rose-colored
glasses so often accompanying the sort of exuberant expectations generated by
the election of a prayed for new broom.

Whether this broom sweeps clean, or simply redistributes the
dirt to under different rugs, we’ll find out soon enough.

Friday, January 30, 2015

The British Museum was founded 1753. It now houses over 8
million objects.

It is famous for many
things including the objective of our visit – the Rosetta Stone, it is
infamous for a few too, the Elgin Marbles.

Like all government funded museums, it is free. Apart from
the special exhibitions but you can spend days wandering around looking at ‘stuff’
and thinking….

Wow, how old is that?

What is it worth?

Who did we steal it from?

Do they want it back?

The BM was founded by
Sir Hans Sloan, physician and
naturalist (1660–1753). He left his
collection of over 70 000 artefacts,
drawings and paintings to King George II.

There is so much to look at and photograph, I’m only
blogging about the bits I like. Durer is probably my favourite artist, along
with Degas ( you can almost smell the horses in Jockey’s in the Rain).

Sloan had purchased much of Durer’s work. I like this….

The Walrus, 1521.

Initially the collection was housed in Montague House. The
BM and the British Library were one and the same – the latter being formed from
many collections including the Royal Libraries (four of them to be precise). The
British Library still owns the Lindisfarne Gospels and the only surviving copy
of Beowulf.

The British Library contains a copy of every book published in
this country and, I think by Act of Parliament,
a copy of every new book published here must be sent to the Library. I have no
idea what happens to the publisher if they fail to do this. The library therefore expands every year and
it needs… wait for it…. 1 ¼ miles of new shelf space each year.

It contains David Garrick’s collection of 1,000 printed
plays!

When a trustee gifted a library of 20 000 books, it took
twenty one horse drawn carriages to move them. That was January 1847.

When T E Lawrence brought back what he had ‘excavated’ at
Carchemish, the whole collection had to be evacuated in 1918 due to the threat of wartime bombing. It was
moved, piece by piece by the postal railway from Holburn (pronounced Hoburn to annoy tourists), to Aberystwyth and Malvern.

The library spilt from the BM to move to a new location in
St Pancras, the final books were moved in
1997.

But more than a
hundred years before that, the trustees had realised that Montague House was no
longer fit for purpose, the collection was getting too big. The light was
difficult and there were issues with dampness and humidity. They looked at a few alternative sites,
including one called Buckingham House but they rejected it on the grounds of
its location.

I think somebody else bought it and converted it for
residential use.

In 1895 the trustees purchased 69 houses that surrounded the Museum and
started demolishing them so they could
expand further. In the 1970’s the museum
expanded again. It became more user friendly. That was my first visit
there, as a wee tiny person to see the "Treasures of Tutankhamun" in
1972. I only remember my legs hurting because we had to queue for so long, and
being constantly told not to get sticky fingermarks on the glass.

It attracted
1,694,117 visitors ( four of them Ramsays) .

It was the most successful exhibition in British history.

It was revamped recently, the huge central quadrangle the ‘Queen Elizabeth II Great Court’ ( the
largest covered square in Europe) opened
in 2000. I believe that no two panes of glass in the roof are the same, but I
didn’t check.

From the original collection, there are now over thirteen
million objects at the British Museum, 70 million at the Natural History Museum
and 150 million at the British Library. The BM website has the largest online
database of any museum in the world. Over 2,000,000 individual objects.

From 2012 to 2013, the museum increased its footfall by
20%,. 6.7 million visitors.

Room 21 – Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven
Wonders of the Ancient World, mid 4th century BC

A big nasty dog, but looking lovingly at its owner who is probably just opening the ancient equivalent of Chappie Doggy Delight. It is the Jennings
Dog, statue of a Molossian guard dog, (2nd Century AD)

Room 23 - The famous version of the 'Crouching Venus',
Roman, c. 1st Century AD

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Just about exactly four years ago the South African Institute of Race
Relations (IRR) released a report called Broken Blue Line. The report documented the involvement of
members of the South African Police Service (SAPS) in serious crime. A variety of recommendations were made and
there was some uptake of these by the authorities.

Yesterday the IRR and sponsor AfriForum
released a follow-up report - titled Broken Blue Line 2 – to assess how the
situation had changed over the last four years.
The murder rate in South Africa over that period has actually dropped by
about 50%, but violent crime has greatly increased, so the background was not encouraging and neither were the findings of the report.

The report is not concerned with corruption -
police taking bribes for turning a blind eye or the like – the report is
concerned with the involvement of police officers in serious, mainly violent,
crime. One would hope that no incidents of this type would be
identified. (A somewhat cursory search
of reports concerning the London Metropolitan police turned up zero reports of
criminal activity of this nature.) In
the case of the SAPS, reports of 100 such incidents were collected in a
relatively short time (a few weeks). The authors of the report claim that
several hundred more instances could be discovered if more time had been
allocated to the search. The hope that
real progress had been made since 2011 was rapidly dashed.

Of the 100 incidents written up, 32 related to murders or
attempted murders, 22 related to armed robberies, 26 related to rapes, and
another 20 related to thefts, robberies and torture. (Some years ago, my stepmother called the police after she had been violently robbed and assaulted. During the police investigation, her handbag
was stolen. This level of pilfering would not have been regarded as serious
enough to make the list of police criminal activities.)

Good guys or bad guys?

The report points out that it is to “the credit of the
police, that many of these cases only entered the public domain because the
police reported having arrested a suspect or suspects who happened to be police
officers. This is a very good thing and we certainly came across more evidence
of such arrests than in 2011. However, that is about as far as the silver
lining extends…” The question is, how many more cases are out there that were
never followed up or never even reported?
There are documented cases of police committing armed robberies in
uniform with police service weapons!
The point is to persuade the victims that there is really no point in
reporting the attack. There is also
evidence of police “clones”: criminal gangs dressed as police in police
vehicles. It is easy to see how this
might help them with their dirty work.
However, the report suggests that this sort of activity could hardly
take place without the involvement of some policemen. As they put it, the criminals have
infiltrated the police rather than the other way around.

Broken Blue Line quotes some
pretty unsettling statistics including that nearly 1500 serving police officers - more than 1% - have been
convicted of a crime ranging from assault, through rape, to murder. Again, one has to wonder how many have not been convicted.

The SAPS management reaction has been
vitriolic. Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega said the report had been released
with “malicious intent” and complained that her picture had been used on the
report without her permission. "I didn't invent crime," she reportedly said. The
methodology and statistics were challenged.
So far, however, there has been no unequivocal denial that there is a structural problem within the SAPS.

It seems only fair to consider the possible bias of the
authors of the report. AfriForum is a
pretty conservative and almost pure white, Afrikaans based, organization that describes itself in
these terms:

AfriForum works to ensure that the basic prerequisites
for the existence of Afrikaners are met, by acting as a credible Afrikaner
interest organisation and civil rights watchdog – as part of the Solidarity
Movement – outside the workplace on national and local level to handle the
impact of the current political realities facing Afrikaners, and to influence
those realities, while working simultaneously to establish sustainable
structures through which Afrikaners are able to ensure their own future.

However, although AfriForum funded it, the report
was written by the Institute of Race Relations. IRR has been around since 1933 and
makes the justified claim that:

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the IRR emerged as the leading
anti-apartheid think-tank as it used its formidable policy expertise to
undermine the ideas underpinning that system and propose a workable alternative
South Africa.It has believed
throughout its history, as it does today, that a secure and peaceful future can
be built only on the principle of one South African nation of different racial
and ethnic groups, each allowed to maintain its own cultural identity, all
united in a common loyalty, but all tolerant of diversity and dissent.

Frans Cronje, one of the authors. The others were Thuthukani Ndebele & John Kane Berman

IRR is a respected institution
in South Africa, albeit one which is accused of talking when more proactive
action was needed in the apartheid years. A report from the IRR cannot be
dismissed simply as ‘malicious’.

Broken Blue Line 2 puts forward
some proposals for consideration. Most
are similar to those of 2011 but updated. They focus on raising the standard
and respect for police management by requiring better levels of education, depoliticising
the appointment of senior officers, and decentralising appointments. On the flip side they recommend more teeth
for the Independent Police Investigation Directorate and an external agency within the Department
of Justice.

The report concludes that “The
good news is that there are policy solutions available. We are not therefore
dealing with a problem that cannot be solved. Rather it is a question of
whether the government has the courage to implement these solutions. Each of
the solutions we propose are entirely within the powers of the government to
implement.”

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

We, at Murder is Everywhere, are pleased and excited to briefly
introduce you to the two newest members of our merry band: Susan I. Spann,
whose first post will appear this Sunday, February 1st (alternating Sundays
with Zoe), and Jørn Lier Horst, who will alternate Wednesdays with Lisa,
beginning February 4th.Their photos are
already up!

I’m sure they’ll be introducing themselves in greater detail,
but here’s just a taste of the new perspectives coming to MIE, starting this
weekend.

Susan Spann grew up in Santa Monica, immersed herself in Japanese
and Chinese studies at Boston’s Tufts University, obtained a law degree, and returned
to California to practice law, traditional archery, martial arts, horseback riding,
online gaming, and raise seahorses.Oh,
yes, and write the terrific, much praised and award recognized, Shinobi Mystery
series featuring Hiro Hattori, a sixteenth-century ninja who brings murderers
to justice with the help of Father Mateo, a Portuguese Jesuit priest.

Norway’s pride and joy, Jørn Lier Horst, is a Former Senior
Investigating Officer in Norway’s Vestfold Police district.He is author of the best selling Chief
Inspector William Wisting series and winner of both the Glass Key Award for best
Nordic Crime Novel and Sweden’s prestigious Martin Beck Award.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

I’m thrilled Laurie R. King is our guest
today sharing a bit of Japan with us. Even more thrilled and excited that she’s
written Dreaming Spies, a new Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes
book. Mary
Russell and Sherlock Holmes are on the steamer Thomas Carlyle, bound for Japan. Aboard the ship, intrigue stirs almost immediately.
Holmes recognizes the famous clubman the Earl of Darley, whom he suspects of
being an occasional blackmailer: not an unlikely career choice for a man richer
in social connections than in pounds sterling. And then there’s the lithe young
Japanese woman who befriends Russell and quotes haiku. Haruki Sato agrees to
tutor the couple in Japanese language and customs, but Russell can’t shake the
feeling that the young woman is not who she claims to be.

Once
in Japan, Russell’s suspicions are confirmed in a most surprising way. From the
Imperial Palace in Tokyo to Oxford’s venerable Bodleian Library, Russell and
Holmes race to solve a mystery involving a small book with enormous
implications of international extortion, espionage, and shocking secrets that,
if revealed, could spark revolution—and topple an empire.

Laurie R. King’s novel Dreaming Spies, set in Japan and Oxford, publishes on February 17.

Thanks for joining us and welcome Laurie! http://www.laurierking.com

—Cara

http://www.laurierking.com/books/mary-russell/dreaming-spies-2015

I write a series
that tends to wander the world.My
characters, Mary Russell and her rather older and somewhat more famous
partner/husband Sherlock Holmes, have touched down in Jerusalem and Aden, the
Orkney Islands and India,

Morocco and
Lisbon.

Sometimes, this is
a way to make use of some of the wandering I’ve done myself: hey, if I
found something interesting years ago when I was in Simla or Jerusalem or Papua
New Guinea

then surely my
characters would too?Other times it was
the other way around, with me planning a trip based on where my characters
wanted to go.Generally, this kind of
thing is a second visit for me, when I can hunt down missed details.Other times, that’s the intention, but…

A few years ago I
went to Morocco, intending to use it as the setting of one small portion of a
book (Salée, in Pirate King).Instead, the country seized my imagination
and demanded a novel of its own (Fez, in Garment
of Shadows).

Once I started
travelling my stories, I found that I had to keep up with it.Really, I do it for the fans, right?So, a few books ago I mentioned that my duo
had spent some time in Japan.Soon,
readers began to raise their hands and say, Er, Mum? Did I miss the book about
Japan?At which point I would reassure
them that no, they hadn’t missed one, just that I couldn’t write about a place
I hadn’t been yet.But I would be going,
any time now.

So I did.

With Barbara Peters

Those of us in the
Crime world (fictional division) know and love the Scottsdale duo of Barbara
Peters and Rob Rosenwald, center of the Poisoned Pen, books and
publishing.

Barbara and Rob,
on hearing that I was considering a trip to Japan, jumped up and said that they
might like to go since they’d really enjoyed their trip there a few years
before, although they wished they could have seen something of the countryside
rather than one population 400,000 “fishing village” after another.

So off the three
of us set to see rural Japan.And by
God, did we ever find it.

Tip #1 for
travelers: if you’re planning on driving in a country where the Roman alphabet
is secondary, get yourself a detailed set of maps before you go.

Tip #2 for
travelers: when you find yourself in the lap of the gods—and you’re sure to,
sooner or later—just go with it.

Accidental travel
can be uncertain, time consuming, uncomfortable, and downright terrifying.But it can also provide those moments of pure
grace that enlighten the traveler’s mind and stay in the heart. More prosaically,
they can give a writer a book—and definitely some scenes she’d not have come up
with had she not been there.

(Yes, that is a warning sign for “Bear ahead”
along the Nakasendo Trail.How, I ask
you, could any writer NOT use that?)

I had a vague idea
of sending Russell and Holmes up one of the traditional post roads of the
Shogunate, the Tokaido along the shoreline being the best known.I also wanted to use an object in the story
that combined the poems of Matsuo Basho with art by Hokusai.To my pleasure, I found that both of them
were regular travelers along both the Tokaido and the northern route called the
Nakasendo, or Kisokaido. So, I suggested a quick drive through that valley on
our way from one majestic garden to another, and we stuck it on our To Do If
Nothing Better Appears list, and in the end, we did indeed aim our car in that
direction rather than another.

We spent a day
poking along the road.There we
discovered a beautifully preserved traditional village—not a museum-town, since
people still live and farm there

although it did
have a few museum-houses. The sorts of houses my characters might have seen in
the Twenties.

I even managed to
work in a mention of the bear, and the village’s water-wheel.

(I did not,
however, inflict a traditional raincoat on my poor characters.)

And of course, it
being spring, everywhere the characters go they find cherries.

None of which I
would have seen—other than the cherries—had we not given ourselves over to the
hazards and blessings of accidental travel.

Monday, January 26, 2015

This past Thursday, for the second time in two years, I
visited Rome’s Galleria Borghese to worship the works of Gian Lorenzo
Bernini. Here is the text of an email I
sent to an Italian friend while I was there.
“All well here. Hotel very
nice. Bernini is God.”

By now, you are sure I am exaggerating.I hope to convince you otherwise.Sort of.

A little background

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was born in Naples in 1598.His sculptor father got work on some
important Papal projects and took the family to Rome when Gian Lorenzo was
eight years old. Inspired by the
classical sculptures of antiquity, he was soon earning commissions of his own.At the age of just 23, he was knighted by
Pope Gregory XV for his artistic genius.Over his lifetime, besides great sculptures, he produced paintings,
wrote plays, created surpassingly wonderful buildings and outdoor spaces, and designed
theater sets.

The whole story in one moment

Bernini began his sculptures with one intention.For his portrait busts, he chose to portray
the exact second when the subject was about to speak.You see it immediately in their faces—their
eyes, their mouths.

Cardinal Scipione Borghese

Constanza, more about which anon

For his magnificent monumental sculptures, he chose the most
dramatic vision of classic or biblical stories, chiseling into the faces and
the bodies all the energy and emotional intensity of his characters.

In his Rape of
Proserpina, he gives us the very moment Hades gets hold of her, at the peak
of her struggle to get free.

See how tightly he grasps her. This is stone!

His David is not
like Michelangelo’s contemplating his battle with fear, determination, and
strategy (for which my admiration does not wane for a nanosecond).Nor is it Donatello’s, at the moment of
triumph.Bernini’s is in the act of
launching the stone.

How does one get rid of everything but the open rope!!

Then there is the work that made me fall in love—Apollo and Daphne at the point where he
catches her, but she is already turning into a tree.

Those leaves!

Those fingers!

That extended leg!

My blogmates here and I have often been asked at conferences
and book presentations to describe our process.“How do you go about it?” people ask.Most of us find the question a bit daunting, because the steps we
follow, how we talk to ourselves about the act of creativity seems so shallow
compared to one’s experience of doing it.But looking at Apollo and Daphne, I
found myself wondering the same thing, because I was stupefied by how Bernini
could have done it.I wish I could have
watched or asked him.Faced with a block
of one the hardest substances appearing in nature, where does one put his
chisel first?Oh, he must have made
drawings and likely a clay model to work from, but really?How does one even contemplate achieving such
perfection when there is no possible way to revise, to correct one’s
mistakes?Once the hammer strikes the
chisel, there is no delete key!It
fills me with awe that he could do it at all.Getting to his level of achievement seems positively divine.

A couple of days after this recent visit to Rome, at dinner,
a friend and I were talking about the facts of Bernini’s life.His most reliable biographer was his son
Domenico, but according to what I could discover, Domenico sanitized some of
his father’s activities. For instance, I imagine he would have wanted to leave
out the more scandalous details of his father’s youthful love affair with a
married woman, inaptly named Constanza.When she threw Gian Lorenzo over for his younger bother Luigi, the great
man’s behavior was anything but god-like.

Mature Self-Portrait

This got me to thinking about one of my pet peeves—that some
people deny the worth of artists’ work because they don’t like the way they
conducted themselves privately.My
conclusion is this: When an artist’s output inspires awe, we should embrace
their real-life flaws.It is only
because of their human frailties that we can be sure that mere humans have
achieved such wonders.There’s a lot to
celebrate in that.

I still have the feeling, though, that my next visit to the
Galleria Borghese will inspire nothing short of worship.